Data compression is the compacting of data by lowering the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. This way, the compressed data will take much less disk space than the original one, so additional content could be stored using identical amount of space. There're various compression algorithms which function in different ways and with some of them just the redundant bits are removed, which means that once the data is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others erase unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data subsequently will result in lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a large amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, therefore each and every web hosting platform which employs compression in real time needs to have enough power to support this feature. An example how info can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" what number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the whole code.

Data Compression in Website Hosting

The cloud hosting platform where your website hosting account shall be created uses the reliable ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the latter employs is better in many aspects, and not only does it compress information better than any compression method which a number of other file systems use, but it's also much faster. The benefits may be significant in particular on compressible content which includes website files. Even though it could sound unreasonable, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed info from a hard drive, so the performance of each Internet site hosted on our servers will be upgraded. The better and quicker compression rates also make it possible for us to generate multiple daily backups of the full content in each web hosting account, so in the event you delete anything by accident, the last backup which we have won't be more than several hours old. This is possible because the backups take considerably less space and their generation is fast enough, so as to not change the performance of the servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans which we provide are created on a powerful cloud platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm called LZ4 that is better than any other algorithm these days in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that more quickly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and for that reason, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will function quicker. We can benefit from the feature regardless of the fact that it needs quite a large amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses a huge number of powerful servers working together and we never create accounts on just a single machine like most companies do. There is another benefit of using LZ4 - since it compresses data really well and does that speedily, we can also make several daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for 30 days. That way, you'll always be able to restore any content that you erase by accident.